Many types of materials represent a significant hazard to people, equipment, buildings, and so on. Such hazardous materials may include biological, chemical, and radioactive materials, among others. When a hazardous material incident occurs, an effective response is needed to minimize the harmful effects of the incident. For example, when a hazardous biological material is released into the atmosphere, the first indications of the incident may be reports by people of unusual bodily conditions (e.g., watery eyes and difficulty breathing). When first responders (e.g., members of a hazmat team) arrive at the scene of an incident, the first responders seek to identify the hazardous material. The first responders may have various detectors available to assist in identifying the hazardous material. These detectors may include spectrometers, radiation detectors, seismometers, and so on.
Although the detectors for detecting hazardous materials can be effective at detecting the presence of hazardous materials, the detectors can be complex devices whose effective use may require a significant amount of training. For example, before each use some detectors may need to be calibrated, which can be a complicated and error-prone process. Some detectors may display graphs representing characteristics of measurements and leave it up to a person to interpret the graphs as part of identifying the hazardous materials that are present. Although some training may be done in a classroom environment, the most effective training can occur in a field exercise environment with the actual hazardous materials. The use of the actual hazardous material, however, can present many problems such as exposing the participants in the exercise to the hazardous material, causing long-lasting contamination to the area of the field exercise, and so on. In addition, it can be expensive be transport the participants and equipment to the location of a field exercise. Moreover, it would be impractical to conduct field exercises at certain locations for several reasons, including disruptions to the normal use of those locations, panic in those people who are not aware that the activity is part of an exercise, and so on.